Necessary things
Or What needs to be carried out in a beak from higher education?
On Habré, there are periodically articles about higher education, around which disputes flare up about whether a person needs higher education as such. But what if we consider the HE not as an existing system of higher education institutions with their training standards, but as something else?
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The Law of Ukraine “On Higher Education” (I think the laws of other countries more or less agree with it) defines HE as a system of knowledge, skills, abilities and personal qualities necessary for successful pursuit of a certain type of intellectual activity (well, in fact, of course, longer and dreary, but the essence is approximately as follows).
Let us leave aside personal qualities (well, can not ethics lessons develop them?). We confine ourselves to information technologies as a type of intellectual activity (firstly, I know this area from my own experience, and not from guesses and books, and secondly, some postulates may not be applicable to other areas). We agree that the knowledge and skills necessary for each person to work is best acquired during the work itself - especially in IT, where current technologies change quickly enough. So what skills and abilities remain in the bottom line - what should be taught in HE? No, not “learn to learn,” although this too.
In this article I will try to answer this question, backing up the answers with life stories, and reflect on how the HE, giving these skills, should look.
I can read something, but the reading in my head does not linger
L. Barrefus “Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents”
Universal literacy does not negate the fact that surprisingly many people simply cannot read in such a way that what they read is delayed in their heads. I think that the importance of the ability to prove is not necessary - the oral transfer of knowledge has long gone to the past, the book is the source of knowledge, and so on in the same vein.
One of the types of competitions on TopCoder are Marathons - two-week optimization tasks. A visualizer is attached to the task - a program for local testing of the solution. The visualizer, in turn, has a lot of documentation attached - a verbal description of use, pseudocode, a list of commands to run, examples in all languages, and finally, old forums! Still, it does not help: almost every match people ask: how to run it? You quote them the documentation verbatim - oh, it worked, thanks! That is, they can read the answer to a specific question, but they no longer use it to subtract it from two pages of documentation.
Theoretically, modern education requires the student to read (books and notes) and use reading (on tests and exams). In practice, this often degenerates into mechanical reproduction.
If repetition is the mother of learning,
So the parrot is his father!
Dm Kimelfeld "Talking parrot"
Agree, very often the information given by the text is also asked - the student does not have to prove that he understood it, or to apply it in practice. Practical classes held in parallel with the lectures usually explain the material again, slowly and with examples, and this is a completely different type of knowledge acquisition.
Issue a text explaining some practical skill, and require the student to use it. To test the ability - to limit the period of work with the text and demonstrate the use of one lesson, without access to the Internet and consultations with fellow students - the same exam.
The difficulty is that the skill should be guaranteed new for the student, and the text should be fairly close to reality, that is, describing not only this skill, but a dozen more, and requiring some parts to guess the part or derive them experimentally.
Esoteric and marginal programming languages ​​are excellent for this - with limited documentation, unobvious implementation nuances, an easy way to check details in the form of an interpreter and an obvious way to use them in the form of a working program.
Even in his silence, spelling mistakes were heard
Stanislav Jerzy Lec
The ability to express one's thoughts - including in writing - will be discussed in the next paragraph, but before that one cannot fail to mention the banal ability to write without eye-catching mistakes. Oddly enough, even with the modern dominance of automatic spelling checkers, people continue to write with errors. Particularly outstanding specimens defend their right to make mistakes - they say, as long as thought can be understood, its form is not so fundamental. In this question I am categorically old-fashioned - the attitude of a person to the things written by him demonstrates his attitude to the readers of these things.
Language is generated by thinking and generates thinking.
Pierre Abelard
In addition, I adhere to the point of view that a person who does not speak his native language sufficiently even to express his own thoughts in a proper manner most likely simply does not produce a thought worth expressing. Understand me correctly - I allow exceptions, but so far I have not met one.
There is no need to go far for examples - even in Habré there are more than enough of them. A person may consider himself a major authority and practically a teacher of life, but personally I can not seriously perceive a person who allows five errors in two lines, and close the topic without reading it to the end, at the sight of something like “Sodom and Gamora”.
I know at least one person who does not just write business letters with errors, but also categorically refuses to correct them. “I am a programmer, I don’t need it!” Is an iron argument, but I really shudder at the thought of what impression his works produce on people with whom he corresponds.
Yes, sometimes I also make mistakes, but flatter myself with the hope that this is the exception rather than the rule. And yes, I write it without spelling :-)
Yes, in principle, nothing. Studying Russian / Ukrainian as a subject ends at school, the best thing about the university was “Business Ukrainian”, a marvelous subject that requires writing as many as six (verifiable) text pages per semester and paying more attention to their careful storage in daddy .
Theoretically, reading primary sources on philosophy / psychology / anything else can contribute to the development of literacy, coupled with the vocabulary, but in practice, students make every effort to avoid this reading and the hypothetical benefit of it. Writing notes does not develop the ability to write, rather the opposite - when you write in a hurry, commas and letters are lost by themselves. All sorts of essays, term papers, diplomas and so on. neither spelling nor artistic value is not checked.
Write. Stupid to write. Well, what else can you do? To write dictations (not only as a child, with a teacher who singled out all the dangerous places in a voice), but seriously) to present and write, to read books with a normal grammar (and not only translation manuals and obviously illiterate forums).
But first you need to somehow convey to the student the idea that his written speech is the same evidence for or against him, like his resume. Hell, no one asks you to write poetry - you can reject the exaggerated demands of some girls as violating the Geneva Convention - but everyone must be able to write prose!
How does the heart express itself?
Other how to understand you?
Will he understand what you live?
The thought expressed is a lie.
Fedor Tyutchev "SILENTIUM!"
A person should be able to convey his thoughts to the interlocutor. Before you proudly declare "My business is to state, and who knows how to understand his personal tragedy," think about how many times in the last week you have taken the time to explain something to an employee and make sure that he understood you exactly the way you wanted to? What, never? So you were on vacation or working alone.
As soon as the number of people in the cell of society exceeds one, the question of communication arises. If people are set on the same thing, they think they seem to have similar experience and goals - this question may not arise or be quickly resolved, but as soon as differences begin in something, problems begin. But very few people realize that the interlocutor thinks differently than he, he has other defaults and associative ranks, and to clarify the thought, you need to put more effort than just to present it.
I explain things, probably, from the seventh class. School topics are for classmates, “what is programming” to a friend-artist (by the way, they did not succeed), particularly vile things from the institute's course to classmates (alas, the role of headwarden and excellent pupils made a great difference). I have never been engaged in tutoring as such, but I have been studying for a long time, though not quite consciously.
Nevertheless, now and again I stumble upon the fact that adult intelligent people (alas, including me) simply do not understand each other, and they have to spend hours so that all negotiators come to the same vision of the problem. If, at the same time, some of them are foreigners, the matter of joints in general is not only due to the language, but also due to the very different meaning that is put into
same words. But this is a separate, difficult case.
No The modern VO scheme does not imply that a student should explain something to someone. At the exam, he does not so much explain the question as he proves that he understands it himself - it is about things that the teacher knows, and there is practically no element of explanation. The student is always the receiver of explanations, and never is their source.
The maximum approximation to the required is the collective work of students discussing the material or helping each other in it. Strictly speaking, this is not mandatory, and the burden (and benefits) of explanations goes to the best student in the group.
To force the student to explain something to someone himself — to someone who did not originally know about this “something”.
The easiest way is to break up students of different years of study into pairs and instruct the elder to explain something to the younger one. The topic should be moderately complex (that is, understandable), but not trivial (that is, requiring some effort for mastering - contain new paradigms, concepts, techniques, etc.). After that, check the understanding of the younger one and do not count the skill of the older one, until the younger one has understood.
The list goes on and on, but these three whales for one post, perhaps, is enough.
Introduction
On Habré, there are periodically articles about higher education, around which disputes flare up about whether a person needs higher education as such. But what if we consider the HE not as an existing system of higher education institutions with their training standards, but as something else?
')
The Law of Ukraine “On Higher Education” (I think the laws of other countries more or less agree with it) defines HE as a system of knowledge, skills, abilities and personal qualities necessary for successful pursuit of a certain type of intellectual activity (well, in fact, of course, longer and dreary, but the essence is approximately as follows).
Let us leave aside personal qualities (well, can not ethics lessons develop them?). We confine ourselves to information technologies as a type of intellectual activity (firstly, I know this area from my own experience, and not from guesses and books, and secondly, some postulates may not be applicable to other areas). We agree that the knowledge and skills necessary for each person to work is best acquired during the work itself - especially in IT, where current technologies change quickly enough. So what skills and abilities remain in the bottom line - what should be taught in HE? No, not “learn to learn,” although this too.
In this article I will try to answer this question, backing up the answers with life stories, and reflect on how the HE, giving these skills, should look.
1. Read
I can read something, but the reading in my head does not linger
L. Barrefus “Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents”
Universal literacy does not negate the fact that surprisingly many people simply cannot read in such a way that what they read is delayed in their heads. I think that the importance of the ability to prove is not necessary - the oral transfer of knowledge has long gone to the past, the book is the source of knowledge, and so on in the same vein.
Life example
One of the types of competitions on TopCoder are Marathons - two-week optimization tasks. A visualizer is attached to the task - a program for local testing of the solution. The visualizer, in turn, has a lot of documentation attached - a verbal description of use, pseudocode, a list of commands to run, examples in all languages, and finally, old forums! Still, it does not help: almost every match people ask: how to run it? You quote them the documentation verbatim - oh, it worked, thanks! That is, they can read the answer to a specific question, but they no longer use it to subtract it from two pages of documentation.
How implemented now
Theoretically, modern education requires the student to read (books and notes) and use reading (on tests and exams). In practice, this often degenerates into mechanical reproduction.
If repetition is the mother of learning,
So the parrot is his father!
Dm Kimelfeld "Talking parrot"
Agree, very often the information given by the text is also asked - the student does not have to prove that he understood it, or to apply it in practice. Practical classes held in parallel with the lectures usually explain the material again, slowly and with examples, and this is a completely different type of knowledge acquisition.
How can I implement
Issue a text explaining some practical skill, and require the student to use it. To test the ability - to limit the period of work with the text and demonstrate the use of one lesson, without access to the Internet and consultations with fellow students - the same exam.
The difficulty is that the skill should be guaranteed new for the student, and the text should be fairly close to reality, that is, describing not only this skill, but a dozen more, and requiring some parts to guess the part or derive them experimentally.
Esoteric and marginal programming languages ​​are excellent for this - with limited documentation, unobvious implementation nuances, an easy way to check details in the form of an interpreter and an obvious way to use them in the form of a working program.
2. Write
Even in his silence, spelling mistakes were heard
Stanislav Jerzy Lec
The ability to express one's thoughts - including in writing - will be discussed in the next paragraph, but before that one cannot fail to mention the banal ability to write without eye-catching mistakes. Oddly enough, even with the modern dominance of automatic spelling checkers, people continue to write with errors. Particularly outstanding specimens defend their right to make mistakes - they say, as long as thought can be understood, its form is not so fundamental. In this question I am categorically old-fashioned - the attitude of a person to the things written by him demonstrates his attitude to the readers of these things.
Language is generated by thinking and generates thinking.
Pierre Abelard
In addition, I adhere to the point of view that a person who does not speak his native language sufficiently even to express his own thoughts in a proper manner most likely simply does not produce a thought worth expressing. Understand me correctly - I allow exceptions, but so far I have not met one.
Life example
There is no need to go far for examples - even in Habré there are more than enough of them. A person may consider himself a major authority and practically a teacher of life, but personally I can not seriously perceive a person who allows five errors in two lines, and close the topic without reading it to the end, at the sight of something like “Sodom and Gamora”.
I know at least one person who does not just write business letters with errors, but also categorically refuses to correct them. “I am a programmer, I don’t need it!” Is an iron argument, but I really shudder at the thought of what impression his works produce on people with whom he corresponds.
Yes, sometimes I also make mistakes, but flatter myself with the hope that this is the exception rather than the rule. And yes, I write it without spelling :-)
How implemented now
Yes, in principle, nothing. Studying Russian / Ukrainian as a subject ends at school, the best thing about the university was “Business Ukrainian”, a marvelous subject that requires writing as many as six (verifiable) text pages per semester and paying more attention to their careful storage in daddy .
Theoretically, reading primary sources on philosophy / psychology / anything else can contribute to the development of literacy, coupled with the vocabulary, but in practice, students make every effort to avoid this reading and the hypothetical benefit of it. Writing notes does not develop the ability to write, rather the opposite - when you write in a hurry, commas and letters are lost by themselves. All sorts of essays, term papers, diplomas and so on. neither spelling nor artistic value is not checked.
How can I implement
Write. Stupid to write. Well, what else can you do? To write dictations (not only as a child, with a teacher who singled out all the dangerous places in a voice), but seriously) to present and write, to read books with a normal grammar (and not only translation manuals and obviously illiterate forums).
But first you need to somehow convey to the student the idea that his written speech is the same evidence for or against him, like his resume. Hell, no one asks you to write poetry - you can reject the exaggerated demands of some girls as violating the Geneva Convention - but everyone must be able to write prose!
3. Speak
How does the heart express itself?
Other how to understand you?
Will he understand what you live?
The thought expressed is a lie.
Fedor Tyutchev "SILENTIUM!"
A person should be able to convey his thoughts to the interlocutor. Before you proudly declare "My business is to state, and who knows how to understand his personal tragedy," think about how many times in the last week you have taken the time to explain something to an employee and make sure that he understood you exactly the way you wanted to? What, never? So you were on vacation or working alone.
As soon as the number of people in the cell of society exceeds one, the question of communication arises. If people are set on the same thing, they think they seem to have similar experience and goals - this question may not arise or be quickly resolved, but as soon as differences begin in something, problems begin. But very few people realize that the interlocutor thinks differently than he, he has other defaults and associative ranks, and to clarify the thought, you need to put more effort than just to present it.
Life example
I explain things, probably, from the seventh class. School topics are for classmates, “what is programming” to a friend-artist (by the way, they did not succeed), particularly vile things from the institute's course to classmates (alas, the role of headwarden and excellent pupils made a great difference). I have never been engaged in tutoring as such, but I have been studying for a long time, though not quite consciously.
Nevertheless, now and again I stumble upon the fact that adult intelligent people (alas, including me) simply do not understand each other, and they have to spend hours so that all negotiators come to the same vision of the problem. If, at the same time, some of them are foreigners, the matter of joints in general is not only due to the language, but also due to the very different meaning that is put into
same words. But this is a separate, difficult case.
How implemented now
No The modern VO scheme does not imply that a student should explain something to someone. At the exam, he does not so much explain the question as he proves that he understands it himself - it is about things that the teacher knows, and there is practically no element of explanation. The student is always the receiver of explanations, and never is their source.
The maximum approximation to the required is the collective work of students discussing the material or helping each other in it. Strictly speaking, this is not mandatory, and the burden (and benefits) of explanations goes to the best student in the group.
How can I implement
To force the student to explain something to someone himself — to someone who did not originally know about this “something”.
The easiest way is to break up students of different years of study into pairs and instruct the elder to explain something to the younger one. The topic should be moderately complex (that is, understandable), but not trivial (that is, requiring some effort for mastering - contain new paradigms, concepts, techniques, etc.). After that, check the understanding of the younger one and do not count the skill of the older one, until the younger one has understood.
The list goes on and on, but these three whales for one post, perhaps, is enough.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/100739/
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